Distributed Open Education Network
= Doenet is a free and open data-driven educational technology platform
URL = https://www.doenet.org/home
"a collaborative effort that combines innovations of previous online mathematics teaching and assessment endeavours." [1]
Description
"The Distributed Open Education Network (Doenet) is an open data-driven educational technology platform designed to measure and share student interactions with web pages. Anonymized and aggregated data will be stored in an open distributed data warehouse to facilitate studies on content effectiveness. The Doenet platform includes tools for authoring interactive educational content and conducting educational research using the content. Our ultimate goal is to provide research-based tools to help instructors and learners discover the most effective content.
Doenet is a collaborative project involving the University of Minnesota, the Ohio State University, and Cornell University, with support from the National Science Foundation "
Characteristics
"DoenetML is the markup language we've created to let you focus on the meaning of the elements you wish to create. Based on PreTeXt, DoenetML looks similar to HTML, with descriptive tags such as <point>, <intersection>, and <answer>."
Interview
Duane Nykamp is interviewed by MathValues:
"* Where did the idea for Doenet come from, and how did you form a team of collaborators?
DN: The collaboration that spawned Doenet started when Mike Weimerskirch introduced the teams behind Ximera (Jim Fowler and Bart Snapp) and Math Insight (Duane Nykamp) realizing they shared both educational goals and philosophy. The core Doenet team has grown to span three institutions. The University of Minnesota group is Duane Nykamp, Mike Weimerskirch, Jonathan Rogness, Kevin Charles, and Vinitha Konduru; Stan Pride played an integral role in the early stages of development. Mathematics professors Jim Fowler and Bart Snapp make up the Ohio State University contingent. Matt Thomas, Ithaca College, provides the undergraduate mathematics education research expertise.
* How will higher education be better off as a result of Doenet?
One impact will be reducing the financial burden on students. We openly license Doenet’s source code as well as the content and learning experiments that we develop. When relying on publishers for content and learning tools, students can find themselves in a course where the only option for completing coursework is through purchasing access to publishers’ tools. By creating and encouraging the development of open, high-quality online content, we can give instructors options that will save students a considerable amount of money.
Universities benefit by keeping the knowledge for assessment and the data on student interactions inside the academy instead of under the control of commercial entities. Rather than asking students to pay commercial third parties to design their assessments and grade their work, we enable faculty to author engaging questions and activities, many of which can be autograded. By ensuring that the knowledge for how to perform assessment remains in the academy, we help universities retain their roles as a source of trusted credentials.
* What have you learned so far in this project? What’s the biggest change or adjustment you’ve had to make?
One of the first projects we have been developing for the Doenet platform is DoenetML, the Doenet markup language. DoenetML, based on PreTeXt, is a language for authoring richly interactive content that can be displayed and automatically graded in a web browser, even if one's device is offline. One challenge has been to design a system that, on one hand, can infer an author's likely intent from simple descriptions, but, on the other hand, has a rich semantic vocabulary for designing complex interactive experiences. We have had to rewrite core pieces of the DoenetML software multiple times as we gained experience with how an author might use the system, and DoenetML evolved significantly from our original expectations.
Balancing privacy and security concerns with the need to track students across websites is a continuing challenge, especially given how bad actors can exploit personal data. As web browser vendors change their policies regarding permissible tracking mechanisms, our technology for tracking students across websites has had to evolve as well, in consultation with security experts and community members. Our solution centers around putting individuals in control of sharing their own data, and we hope to build confidence through complete transparency of how the data is anonymized, aggregated and shared to benefit the entire community."
(https://www.mathvalues.org/masterblog/reimagining-online-mathematics)
Status
- "Although we are still in the early stages, we are excited to introduce Doenet and illustrate the richly interactive activities that one can author with it." [2]
- "Doenet was conceived in 2018 and began as a partnership of the University of Minnesota, Ohio State University and Ithaca College. We piloted Doenet content in 2020 and ran our first courses with Doenet in 2021. We have used Doenet for both content delivery and assessment, incorporating learning experiments in order to perform analyses on the effectiveness of the materials.
In 2022, we are beginning to expand the availability of Doenet beyond the original partner institutions."
More information
- Contact us: [email protected]